Category: TED

Why do happy people cheat? Esther Perel’s powerful TED talk: “Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts”

Alongside Gary Wilson’s presentation on porn, this was one of those talks that really stayed with me and had me mulling over its conclusions.

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Why Happy Couples Cheat | Esther Perel

  • adultery has existed as long as marriage, and so too the taboo
  • adultery is the only commandment repeated twice in Bible (once for doing it, once just for thinking about it!)
  • “monogamy used to be one person for life, today it’s one person at a time”
  • “we used to marry and have sex for the first time, now we marry and stop having sex with others”
  • infidelity estimates vary widely, from 26 to 75%
  • we are walking contradictions: 95% say it’s terribly wrong for our partner to lie about an affair, but same % say that’s what we would do if we were having one
  • infidelity used to threaten our economic arrangement, now it threatens our emotional arrangement
  • core problem: we believe one person can fulfill every need, thus infidelity threatens everything
  • “affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts”
  • today we’re more inclined to stray than ever; we feel right to pursue our desires; we believe we deserve to be happy
  • “staying is the new shame” (after discovering an affair)
  • affairs — even by couples married and faithful for decades — are often a yearning for our old selves, for strength after loss (a parent dies, or you lose your job)
  • “not so much that we are looking for another person, but we are looking for another self”
  • one word unfaithful spouses use: ALIVE, they feel ALIVE
  • it’s not about sex but DESIRE
  • majority of experienced couples stay together, and can turn an affair into opportunity to grow
  • avoid mining for sordid details — better to move on, figure out meaning and motives, not logistics
  • “your first marriage is over, would you like to create a second one, together”

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Here’s my complete list of TED notes!

38 powerful insights from Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

Alain de Botton is one of my favorite thinkers/writers/intellectuals. I’ve written about his work in the past, such as his TED talk on success and his book Religion for Atheists.

By now I’ve read and watched a lot of the content he’s put online, so I wanted to share some of my favorite insights across his work with you. So in no particular order…

(most of the below is paraphrase, with direct quotes in italics)

Alain de Botton on how to think more about sex

1. There’s nothing that is considered sexy that isn’t, with the wrong person, disgusting

2. The magic of oral sex is that it takes the dirtiest part of us and makes it clean. That part is accepted by another person

3. What turns us on? It’s often what’s missing…from our childhoods, our moms

4. Why do we have too little sex? It’s because the person we have sex with is someone we do too much other stuff with (in past, people had more specific gender and vocational roles but now, we do everything together)

Alain de Botton on success
on YouTube

5. Snobbery is when you know only a little bit about someone but draw much larger conclusions about them

6. We’re not materialistic, we live in a society where emotional rewards are pegged to material goods. So when you see a Ferrari driver, don’t criticize them for being greedy, instead, see them as somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love

7. We’ve done away with the caste system. We’re told anyone can achieve anything, which generates envy (envy is our dominant modern emotion)

8. What is envy? Envy is relatability. When you can’t relate to them, you can’t envy them

9. It’s bad enough to not get what you want. It’s even worse to get what you want, after all this hard work, only to realize it may not be what you wanted all along

Alain de Botton on status anxiety

10. Low-paying jobs are frowned upon not just because of the pay…but because of their perceived status. Vice-versa for high-paying jobs

11. In a “just” society like ours, we believe the rich deserve their success, but we also assume the poor deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)

12. Jesus and Socrates as great exemplars for being sacrificial and sticking to their beliefs

13. We want the respect of people who we don’t even respect

Alain de Botton on why pessimism is healthy

14. The problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, we’ve taken such great strides as mankind that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day.

15. Ironically, the secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research, etc

16. Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers instead to tolerate (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”).

Alain de Botton’s talk at Google
on YouTube

17. We’ve offloaded making up our minds to things like social media and the news

18. News drives us insane with envy; envy is good, but we don’t extract its lessons

19. We need MORE bias in the news: GOOD bias, not false fairness

Alain de Botton on Socrates and self confidence
on YouTube

20. There are 5 steps to have a good thought:

Step 1. look for “plain common sense” statements
Step 2. try to find exceptions
Step 3. if an exception is found, that must mean statement is false or imprecise
Step 4. try to incorporate the exception into the original statement
Step 5. continue this process, keep finding exceptions, until it’s impossible to disprove

21. Socrates believed we can have an interesting philosophical conversation anywhere, on a street corner or at home or in a foreign place

22. Socrates had reservations about democracy (lived in Athenian democracy). He argued that just because the majority of people believe something doesn’t make it right. What matters is whether the argument is logical and reasonable, not whether the majority says so

Alain de Botton on La Rochefoucauld
Philosophers Mail

23. There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.

Alain de Botton on Epicurus on happiness
on YouTube

24. Happiness is important: it comes from friends (as permanent companions), freedom (Epicurus left city life to start a commune), and an analyzed life (to find the time and space for quiet thinking about our lives)

Alain de Botton on Schopenhauer and his views on love
on YouTube

25. Being hurt by rejection is to not fully understand the requirements of acceptance

26. Love has nothing to do with happiness, it’s all about procreation, the “Will to life” (like Nietzsche’s “Will to power”)

Alain de Botton on Nietzsche and hardship
on YouTube

27. One of the few philosophers who wrote about pain and hardship, he believed they were necessary evil for enjoyment and success

Alain de Botton on Montaigne on self-esteem

28. Animals often surpass us in wisdom. They are much more natural about their bodies

29. Every society has customs which create narrow minds. To counter it, travel widely

30. How can you test for wisdom? Ask questions such as:

What should one do when anxious?
What is a good parent?
How can you tell if one is in love or infatuated?

31. “even on the highest throne, we are seated, still, on our asses”

From Religion for Atheists

32. As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’

33. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

34. The single danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage

35. The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

36. Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture).

37. Comte…was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation – however bold and far- fetched they might initially sound – were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. […] The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful… He drew most heavily from Catholicism […] and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.

38. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping’, or upādāna in Sanskrit.

TED talk notes: Nick Hanauer’s famous banned talk on the rich and Clio Cresswell on math + sex

Listening to TED talks was a regular habit of mine. I’m slowly publishing the notes, to share with readers and as a personal refresher. Here’s the full list of notes.

This week we have a talk from Nick Hanauer (one of the infamous banned talks) on why rich people don’t create jobs, and from Clio Cresswell on the link between math and sex.

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Nick Hanauer: Rich people don’t create jobs

  • the rich aren’t job creators, supply side economics is false
  • consumers are king, consumers create jobs
  • hiring is a last resort for capitalists. to call capitalists job creators is disingenuous
  • rich people may consume more, but it’s not commensurate with their higher earnings
  • look at recent decades: as taxes on rich and capital gains have gone down, unemployment has stayed high, real incomes for middle and lower class have stagnated
  • to raise taxes on the rich benefits everyone long-term
  • help the middle class prosper, and create jobs for everyone

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Mathematics and sex | Clio Cresswell

  • there are equations that predict with 95% accuracy whether spouses will stay together over time, includes data on in-laws and body language
  • couples that compromise the LEAST ended up staying together the longest
  • maybe having high standards, finding ways to reach for them, is the way to go
  • mathematics is used in many fields: from creating chocolate to optimizing antibiotics to predicting political elections
  • men overestimate their # of past sexual partners, but estimation as a process usually leads to over-guessing (her favorite clue in the data: 80% of self-reported men’s numbers were divisible by 5!)
  • testosterone peaks in morning, slumps in the evening, and cycles every 2 to 2.5 hours
  • rats can count approximately, but can’t do exact because they don’t have a linguistic / mental representation of numbers. we’re the same: if we can’t count out a sequence, we can only do approximations, too

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!

Winners Always Finish: a review of the famous Grit study by Angela Duckworth

Behavioral psychology concepts tend to explode onto the scene like Billboard #1 songs. And then they’re discarded just as quickly. Only a few have staying power: Mikhail C’s description of flow and why it’s so good to get lost in your work. Carol Dweck’s concept of a growth mindset and the value of believing that failure isn’t a permanent condition.

To those two (and some others), I would add Angela Duckworth’s famous grit study. Like all psychology findings that stick around, it has a catchy keyword and it reveals a truth about human behavior that is both intuitive and surprising. Whether you’re gritty or not, you want more of it, and you especially want your kids to have it.

So I finally read the original research paper because I’m a nerd who is obsessed with habits, and I believe grit can be a habit.

The brief summary: “don’t give up and you’ll eventually succeed.” But there’s a lot more to the study and its findings. As academic research papers go, it was a fun one to read. I wanted to share some of the nuances and insights with you.

So what is grit?

Grit is “perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress”

Winners always finish

Many people think that grit is about working hard and not quitting. But grit is also about FOLLOWING THROUGH on what you start. Gritty people commit to one pursuit, to the exclusion of others. They finish what they begin. That’s what makes them winners.

Follow-through is “evidence of purposeful continuous commitment to certain types of activities versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas”

“whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible […] eg, a prodigy who practices intensively yet moves from piano to saxophone to voice will likely be surpassed by an equally gifted but grittier child”

The concept of follow through seems to be ignored when we talk about grit.

More notes and excerpts

  • if you’re conscientious, chances are you’re also gritty
  • grit is not correlated with general intelligence. in fact there is some evidence that it’s inversely correlated
  • high achievers [are] triply blessed by “ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour”
  • forget 10 years of practice, 20 is even better: “over 10 years of daily deliberate practice set apart expert performers from less proficient peers and that 20 years of dedicated practice was an even more reliable predictor of world-class achievement”
  • grit increases with age and level of education (graduate students had the most grit…)
  • grit isn’t everything, especially when young. the authors specifically state, “a strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths”
  • but grit predicted things like: drop out rates during Westpoint’s summer Beast Barracks; performance at the National Spelling Bee; GPAs at the top universities; graduation rates at inner city schools

and just because it’s interesting:

“Participants (at the National Spelling Bee Finals) studied for the spelling bee an average of 2.25 hours per day on weekends and 1.34 hours per day on weekdays”

Angela gives a TED talk, embedded below. It’s interesting, although it’s not a summary of her research:

If you like these talks here’s my list of TED talks and notes.

More thoughts on grit

I’m reminded of Rule 50 from The Little Book of Talent: “Build grit, love the grind”

I’m reminded of David Brooks who says that love is both transcendent magic and a gritty commitment.

Paul Tough, in a podcast (it might have been an episode of This American Life), says that the ideal stage to start teaching grit is adolescence, when people first become “meta cognitive”. And to build grit, a close attachment to a parental figure is important (I suppose for the sense of safety and security?).

Thanks for reading! What psych studies / research papers are your favorites?